Vignettes

Marriage

In the afternoon I pick up two white socks from the landing, empty the trash can and recycling, put bags back inside to replace those removed, start the laundry, hang up the diapers. I do all of these things for no apparent reason. I do them because they need to get done. When I see my wife and tell her all that I have done, she smiles approvingly. I can tell in her heart of hearts that she loves a man who puts away his shorts, and I am reminded of how easy it would be to please her, but they still seem to find their way onto the floor next to my bed. Happiness be damned.

Swimming

For a year or so I took up swimming. At first I chopped at the water as though it was a tree to be felled, kicking up large arcs of water that bathed fellow swimmers in a waterfall of failure. You see, when I was six I had been held back in swimming lessons because my technique was so poor. If I could travel back in time I'd let the teacher know that it was a sign of my profound placement at the top of the evolutionary change. Remind her that my inability to do a solid butterfly kick was related to the vast distances that I'd traveled from those webbed things that had first crawled on solid earth. And I'd tell her, poor girl, that I still have many more miles to go. She was right though, I am a poor swimmer.


On dreams

I am not the sort of person who bothers to remember his dreams. For a while I thought about putting a dream journal next to my bed, sketching out the ragged edges of the pictures in my mind. But that's just it, all I ever did was think about keeping that dream journal, I never bought the damn thing. I'd like to say that it was some sort of conscious decision, not getting the dream journal, but I'm afraid it wasn't. But still, it leaves open the possibility that my mind will travel across the vast reaches of space without anyone ever knowing. Perhaps I'll be a king with sixty concubines each more beautiful than the last, a departed Mormon and god of his own little galaxy, or perhaps I'll learn to fly, or visit a city underwater, with beautiful mermaids who possess an exact replica of the world above, down to the minutest detail in a trench so deep that it is larger than the whole of the dry land. Perhaps in that life I'll be a fish, and I'll watch mermaids play ping pong with their tails. Who am I to keep my mind from dreaming? Who am I to record its wanderings? Each morning I awake anew to the incessant beeping of a small black alarm. Dreams are for those who never awake.

On yellow

It seems to me that yellow is the purest of colors. I'm biased I know, worshiper that I am of the sun, worshiper that I am of golden hair. Gold is yellow too of course, and I see that I am not alone in this love of yellow. I remember yellow hair, yellow moonlight on the water, yellow ducks swimming through yellow pools of light. What a color, I say, to the woman sitting next to me on the train home from work. She has black hair and does not remember who I am though we've known each other since childhood, and it's only just now that I've remembered. At the next stop she changes seats, stands up for no apparent reason. At her feet yellow light swims and the shadows dart across it as the train moves like a school of fish. I can see that she loves yellow too, but I keep the secret to myself. Some things, as has been said a thousand times before, are better left unsaid.